Swiss Reject U.S. Request to Extradite Polanski

GENEVA — Roman Polanski’s repeated claims that there was misconduct at his trial for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 ran into a brick wall in American courts. But they were enough apparently to convince Swiss authorities that he should walk free.

Switzerland announced Monday that it would not extradite Mr. Polanski, a famous film director, to the United States in part because of fresh doubts over the conduct of the judge in his original trial.

“He’s a free man,” the Swiss justice minister, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, said at a news conference on Monday.

The ruling means that, after nearly a year of courtroom wrangling in the United States and Switzerland, the case is roughly where it has been for decades: Mr. Polanski is free to return to his home in France but remains wanted in the United States. He was arrested at the Zurich airport last September on an international warrant issued by the United States on charges including rape and sodomy dating from 1977. In December, the Swiss authorities allowed him to move to his chalet in the ski resort of Gstaad under house arrest on bail of $4.5 million pending a decision on his extradition.

The arrest and the request for extradition opened up a cultural divide both in the United States and Europe as filmmakers, intellectuals, politicians and victims’ rights groups lined up on either side of the debate. At issue: had Mr. Polanski suffered enough for his crimes, as his supporters argued, or were his celebrity and talent obscuring the serious nature of the charges against him?

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said he was “delighted” and deeply relieved by the ruling. Samantha Geimer, who at 13 was Mr. Polanski’s victim in the original sex case, has long disclosed her identity and called to end the prosecution.

Joelle Casteix, the western regional director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said she was “grossly disappointed.” Ms. Casteix, whose group assists the victims of sexual abuse, added, “This sends a message that if the abuser is rich and powerful, that person can flee the country and get away scot free.”

The decision to free Mr. Polanski was a sharp defeat for prosecutors in Los Angeles, who had warded off repeated challenges by insisting that Mr. Polanski’s claims to have been wronged by authorities in the past could not be considered until his fugitive status had ended. Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, is the Republican candidate for state attorney general.

In a statement, Mr. Cooley said his office would continue to pursue extradition if Mr. Polanski were arrested somewhere other than Switzerland.

“Our office complied fully with all of the factual and legal requirements” of the treaty with Switzerland, Mr. Cooley said. All of the original charges against Mr. Polanski are still pending, Mr. Cooley noted, because he was never sentenced under a plea agreement that reduced those to just unlawful sex with a minor.

Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, said that the Obama administration was still looking at its options about what to do next but was “deeply disappointed” by the Swiss decision.

“We thought our extradition request was completely supported by the treaty, completely supported by the facts and the law, and the underlying conduct was of course very serious,” Mr. Breuer said.

Photo

The film director Roman Polanski in April on the balcony of his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he was under house arrest.Credit
Laurent Cipriani/Associated Press

In effect, Mr. Polanski’s United States legal team worked around the prosecutors, by hammering in many of his claims in appeals court briefs that — while not directly successful in ending the case — appear to have made an impression on the Swiss. In choosing to free Mr. Polanski, the Swiss, at least to some extent, passed judgment on the conduct of the case in Los Angeles.

“I think they’re raising eyebrows about what happened,” said Laurie L. Levenson, a professor of law at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The turning point in the case occurred in mid-March, when Mr. Polanski’s lawyers disclosed in an appeals brief that Roger Gunson, a now-retired lawyer who originally prosecuted the case, had given sealed testimony describing a plan by Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, the original judge, to limit Mr. Polanski’s sentence to a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, a portion of which Mr. Polanski had served during his 42 days in Chino State Prison.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Gunson, who gave the testimony in January, also described his own reservations about the handling of the case by Judge Rittenband, who is now deceased.

Courts here refused to open Mr. Gunson’s testimony, which was taken provisionally, because he was gravely ill, and was supposed to be used at Mr. Polanski’s eventual sentencing. But Mr. Polanski’s legal team described the testimony in court filings that were widely described by media outlets.

The Swiss authorities, without success, requested access to the Gunson account, arguing that it would have established whether the judge had assured Mr. Polanski that time he spent in a psychiatric unit would constitute the whole of his period of imprisonment.

“If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence, and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation,” the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Mr. Polanski’s legal team in the United States declined to comment. Reached by telephone Monday morning, Mr. Gunson said he was unaware of the decision and declined to comment.

Georges Kiejman, one of Mr. Polanski’s lawyers in Europe, said Monday’s decision was a vindication of sorts, and a step toward resolving what he called an “American misunderstanding” of Mr. Polanski’s case. Mr. Kiejman said he hoped Mr. Polanski would one day be able to return freely to the United States. “Intellectually and artistically, it’s one of his adoptive homelands,” he said.

Mr. Polanski would have faced an uncertain future if he had been returned for sentencing. As he was held over the last nine and a half months, prosecutors did not make clear their specific plans for him, but they signaled that a sentence much longer than 90 days might be in order.

In May, for instance, David Walgren, currently the lead prosecutor in the case, took a sworn statement from Charlotte Lewis, a British actress who, at a Los Angeles press conference, said she was subjected to an unwanted sexual encounter with Mr. Polanski in the early 1980s.

Monday’s decision by the Swiss was presumably a boost for Marina Zenovich, a documentary filmmaker whose “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” brought the case to new prominence in 2008 by airing interviews in which prosecutors and others described Judge Rittenband’s claimed missteps.

Ms. Levenson said prosecutors and judges who have handled the case in recent years appear to have acted correctly, but that clearly was not sufficient in this case.

“The lesson may be that it’s really hard to go back in time 30 years to remedy a case,” Ms. Levenson said. “If you don’t get justice at the right time, you may not get it at all.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2010, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Swiss Reject U.S. Request To Extradite Polanski. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe